The state of Victoria, iSelect, Monash University and Commonwealth Bank drew high slots in a lottery at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to determine the order in which ICANN will evaluate applications for new top-level domains.

Those and other Australian organisations have applied for new ‘dot word’ domains in the style of .com or .org. The new top-level domains are expected to go live next year as ICANN completes evaluations of the applications. About 1900 new top-level domains were ranked today.

There were eight Australian TLDs in the top 500, out of 41 total Australian applicants.

The first Australian company to be drawn was iSelect, securing the number-173 spot for .select. Not counting the non-Latin language top-level domains, which were given priority by ICANN and took the top 107 slots, iSelect was the 66th drawn.

Monash University got the 338th spot with .monash. Open Universities Australia secured the 349th slot with .study. Victoria came in at 350 with .Melbourne. CommBank got number 378 with .cba.

The first new TLDs are expected to go live in July or August, according to ARI Registry Services CEO, Adrian Kinderis. Coming in 1000 places after a competitor could mean a year’s difference, he said.

For example, with Victoria coming in 350 and New South Wales getting slot 1352, .melbourne could go live an entire year ahead of .Sydney, he said.

While the list provides a preview of what top-level domains we will start seeing next year, securing a slot in the lottery does not guarantee the address will go live because an ICANN evaluation is still required.

Also, if more than one applicant applied for the same TLD, ICANN will evaluate all of the applicants for that address before choosing a winner.

Tennis Australia, for example, was one of several applicants for .tennis. The group got slot 991 for evaluations, but won’t know if it has the TLD until ICANN evaluates number 1326, Washington Team Tennis, and any others who applied for .tennis.

After the evaluation and any contentions are worked out, an applicant must negotiate a contract with ICANN and have its systems tested.

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